Unlike most of my short stories, which just grew from the middle out, this story had a definite birth. In 1998, a man named James Byrd, Jr was tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged down a road until his head separated from the rest of his body. The fact that this happened because Byrd was black and his attackers were white is horrifying. The fact that anyone, of any color, could do this to another human being is horrifying, The fact that media paid very little attention because everyone was too busy talking about who was or wasn’t doing what to whom in the oval office, this too is horrifying. I walked around for weeks saying “I hope the bomb drops and the cockroaches take over, because humans have sure done a piss poor job of running things so far.” Then I shut up and wrote a book. At some point in the process I regained my optimism. Maybe it’s not too late to learn to be horrified.